The ferry that waits for the tide

Marit Oyen keeps the tide table in her coat, folded into eighths and soft as cloth. At 6:12 the water stops moving. For eleven minutes nothing on the channel goes anywhere, and that is when she starts the engine.

The ferry is called Little Sister. It is nine metres long, carries four cars or one tractor, and has missed eighteen crossings since 1985, all of them in February.

She learned the channel from her father, who learned it from a man who never wrote anything down. The sandbanks move a little every winter. Marit moves the marker buoys herself, in a dinghy, in March.

The channel is 2.4 kilometres wide and, at slack water, never deeper than four metres. The crossing takes nineteen minutes. Passengers are asked to stay in their cars, and almost none of them do.

“You do not cross the sea here. You borrow it, and you give it back by noon.”

On the island side a man named Edvin waits with a rope he does not need. He has met every morning boat since his wife died. Marit throws him the line anyway.

Orsa is 312 hectares of grass, salt pans and one road. When the tide goes out the island doubles in size, and the marsh channels drain in a pattern that looks, from the lighthouse, like the veins of a leaf.

Eleven people live here through the winter. They buy flour, diesel and stamps from the same counter, and they all know the tide table better than their own birthdays.

The evening crossing leaves at 18:47 in October. Marit says it is the only one she would keep if she could keep one. The island goes dark behind her one window at a time.

Next spring the county will open a causeway. The ferry will be sold to a museum in Hallby, where it will sit on dry land for the first time in its life. Marit has not decided whether she will visit.